My last post on 18 June 2016 looked at the squalid conditions under which most Irish immigrants existed in Stafford during the Famine and, indeed, beyond. That post ended with some comments about the Council’s harassment of Irish lodging house keepers for overcrowding their dwellings and the creation of ‘nuisances’. That prompted me to look a bit more closely at the general role of lodging houses in Victorian Stafford and this rather long post is the result.

What was a lodging house?

In one sense the character of a lodging house seems obvious – it was the place where the poorest of the poor and the vagrants of Victorian society were forced to find a bed if they were not to sleep on the street or in the Workhouse. When it came to defining precisely what a lodging house was, however, Victorian legislators struggled and some of their problems also afflict the historian researching them today. Many households in Victorian times took in lodgers – so did that make them all ‘lodging houses’? Clearly the answer is no. The framework legislation on lodging houses in 1847 and 1851 failed to arrive at a workable definition.[1] Finally, regulations issued under the 1853 Common Lodging Houses Act specified that the essential distinction between lodging houses and any other premises containing lodgers was that ‘persons being strangers to one another, that is, not being of the same family, and promiscuously brought together, are allowed to occupy the same room’.[2] Hotels, inns and taverns were explicitly excluded although at the margins many cheap pubs and beer houses in practice did operate as de facto lodging houses.

62/3 Foregate Street. Built around 1698, this grand house was divided in the 19th century and the left hand end (62) was a lodging house from the 1840s to c1914. The right hand side was the Dewdrop Inn from 1860-1910. (Picture from J. Connor, The Inns & Alehouses of Stafford: through the North Gate, 2014)

The 1853 definition is used for this study of Stafford with the additional limitation that households must have contained at least three unrelated ‘lodgers’ to qualify as a lodging house. This excludes places where one or two lodgers were taken in as a supplement to the family income, though inevitably the borderline can be fuzzy. It is also sometimes imprecise when there is a mixture of lodging nuclear families, couples and individuals. Another problem is that many of the houses in Stafford were miserable two room cottages packed into the back streets and yards. There are cases where two small dwellings were knocked through into one ‘lodging house’ or one house was packed with lodgers whilst the keeper’s family lived next door. A final practical problem is that house numbers were frequently changed during the nineteenth century and it can sometimes be difficult to trace the use of particular properties accurately.

The earliest registers of licenced lodging houses in Stafford do not appear to have survived and the extant data runs from 1878.[3] Even if they were available for the whole period, the list of registered lodging houses would certainly be an incomplete picture since many operators evaded the licencing authorities, particularly in the 1850s and 1860s. This study therefore uses the Register data but also identifies likely lodging houses from the Census returns and from contemporary newspaper reports. Evasive householders may well have under-reported lodgers in the Census returns but they remain, nevertheless, the best source we have for snapshots of the overall picture.

Lodging houses formed a reserve housing stock catering for the migrant, the vagrant and often the deviant of Victorian society. They were regarded with suspicion by ‘decent’ society and they posed challenges to the authorities in terms of the responsibilities for inspection and control and the development of workable relationships with lodging house keepers.[4] These issues can be seen in the case of Stafford.

The overall picture

The graph shows the number and breakdown of lodging house occupants in Stafford from 1851 to 1901. The green sections show the Irish-born and descended occupants divided between lodging house keepers and their families (‘IFam’) and Irish-born and descended lodgers (‘ILod’), Similarly the non-Irish are divided into families (‘NFam’) and lodgers (‘NLod’). There were 41 identifiable lodging houses in 1851 and the number then dropped to 31 in 1861, 17 in 1871, rose to 19 in 1881 and then fell again to 12 in 1891 and 9 in 1901.

Lodging house occupants, Stafford, 1851-1901

Lodging the Famine immigrants

In January 1851 five Irish lodging house keepers were summonsed for keeping their houses ‘in a filthy and unwholesome state.’[5] Not surprising. Of the 533 Irish-born people in Stafford in 1851 – the vast majority of them Famine immigrants – two thirds (364) were living in 41 identifiable lodging houses in the town. An average over eleven people were crammed into each of these tiny dwellings. Typically about a third of them were the householder’s own family and the rest were families, part-families or lone individuals who were the destitute victims of the Famine and who desperately needed somewhere to live. On Census night in 1851, for example, Patrick Welsh was living at No. 4 Allen’s Court with his wife and baby and they had taken in eleven other people who were a mixture of lone individuals, married couples and one widowed woman and a tiny baby. Round the corner at No. 4 Malt Mill Lane Patrick’s brother John, his wife and two children were host to three couples, a widowed mother and her adult daughter together with William Flanagan, a young single labourer. These were typical Irish lodging houses during the Famine period. The Council got their knife into Patrick Welsh. In 1853 he was fined 40s for overcrowding his lodging house. It was the third time he had been prosecuted.[6]

Lodging houses in 1851

A lot of the householders who took people in during the Famine crisis and its aftermath doubtless exploited their tenants – after all, income from lodgers was essential to their own survival. Living conditions were shocking in any case. These people were not, however, professional lodging house keepers. They had ended up in the role through chance and necessity and only one of those visible in 1851 ultimately made a long-term business of it. This was the Kelly family at 52 New Street. James and Jane Kelly are known to have kept lodging houses at various places in the town in the 1850s and 1860s and we shall meet Jane again in 1868.[7] Most were, however, offering accommodation and minimal support on a casual basis to compatriots from their own area in Ireland. At 18 Back Gaol Road, for example, Thomas Jones made sure the Census enumerator took full details of precisely where everybody in his house had been born. All but one of the fourteen people there (from seven different families) came from the borderlands of Galway, Roscommon and Mayo that were the source of many of Stafford’s immigrants. A network of contacts and information was clearly at work, a feature which has, of course, been widely seen amongst more recent immigrants to Britain.

Not all the lodging house keepers were Irish, however. In 1851 nine of them were English and they didn’t offer much to the Irish. Most were linked to the shoe trade and typically took in shoemakers ‘on tramp’ but at 46 Foregate Street John Faulkner was already operating a fully-fledged commercial lodging house. The sixteen lodgers there in 1851 had a wide range of occupations but only John Connor, a farm labourer, was Irish. Faulkner was to continue in the lodging house business in the same area until his death in 1883, aged 77.[8]

Lodging houses and migrant labour, c1855-65

During the Famine crisis lodging houses had played a vital role housing the flood of destitute emigrants but that function died away as the Famine Irish either settled in Stafford in their own accommodation or moved on elsewhere. By 1861 the numbers using lodging houses had declined steeply and it had changed in character. Many Irish had long come to the Stafford area for seasonal harvest work and this process carried on after the Famine. These people needed lodgings. In 1861 over 60 per cent of the Irish males in lodging houses were agricultural labourers and another fifth were building labourers. In other words, the lodging houses were now catering for more ‘normal’ migrant workers and the lodging house keepers also changed. The number of lodging houses had dropped to 31 and seventeen of them were kept by men who claimed to be agricultural labourers. These were people who had settled in Stafford, continued to work (to some extent) on the farms but also probably acted as ‘gang masters’ with lodgings for migrant workers with contacts in their areas of origin in Ireland.

Lodging houses in 1861

This changed function for lodging houses also saw the emergence of professional Irish lodging house keepers. Seven of those operating in 1861 (or their families) continued in the business into the 1870s, 1880s and even the 1890s. The Hingerty family are an example. Patrick and Bridget Hingerty were outsiders to most of Stafford’s immigrant Irish because they came from Co.Tipperary. This ‘outsider’ status seems to have characterised a number of lodging house keepers and emphasises that it was a distinctly pariah occupation in Victorian society. The Hingertys settled in Stafford in the early 1850s and by 1855 they were running a lodging house at No. 12 Back Walls North. In that year Patrick Hinnerty (sic) was fined ten shillings plus costs for infringing the lodging house bye-laws. [9] Patrick died in 1866 but Bridget carried on there until the late 1870s.[10] These premises continued to operate as a lodging house right into the Inter-War period, although by then the Hingertys had long gone and their descendants had integrated into wider Stafford society.

The Kelly family were also outsiders in that they came from an area of eastern Mayo that was outside the region of Stafford’s other Irish immigrants. They are known to have operated lodging houses in New Street (1851), Bell Yard (1859), Cherry Street (1863-6), Mill Street (1866) and Malt Mill Lane (1868).[11] James and Jane Kelly’s lodging houses housed the floating poor – tramps, hawkers, itinerant workers and new immigrants from Ireland and they were before the magistrates on a number of occasions for flouting the by-laws and other types of trouble.[12] The end came in 1868 when the premises in Malt Mill Lane were exposed as the base for a gang of juvenile thieves. Jane Kelly herself was the organiser and received a cut of the proceeds. She was given a year in prison and settled in the Potteries for some years after her release. She later returned to Stafford and died there in 1881.[13]

The residual role of lodging houses, c1866 to the 1900s

From around 1866 increasing use of machinery meant Staffordshire farmers needed fewer seasonal and casual workers and this meant that the use of lodging houses by migrant Irish farm workers declined sharply. Agricultural labourers who doubled as lodging house keepers also largely disappeared from the market and the number of lodging houses dropped from 31 in 1861 to 17 in 1871. Eight out of the thirteen Irish lodging house keepers were now fully commercial operators. Michael and Mary Ward, for example, had started in the 1850s in the overcrowded slum of Middle Row, Gaol Road, but by 1871 they had moved to No. 42 Broad Eye and they operated a de facto lodging house there until Michael’s death in 1882. Mary continued the business until she died in 1888.[14] They never registered with the authorities but operated in the shady world of unlicenced lodging houses.

Thomas Durham did become a registered lodging house keeper. A bricklayer’s labourer from Co. Mayo, he seems to have arrived in Stafford in the early 1870s and by 1873 was already running a lodging house in Back Walls South. In April that year two tramps got drunk and the ‘house was made hideous with their noises.’ The male tramp got an axe and threatened his wife with it but he said ‘it was a playful way of showing affection’.[15] The incident gives a flavour of lodging house life at its worst. In 1879 Durham took over Hingertys’ lodging house at No. 12 Back Walls North and remained there until just before his death in August 1891, at which point he was described as a ‘ragman’. The business was re-registered in October by Elizabeth Perry, a Staffordshire woman, and it thereafter remained in English hands.[16]

Census evidence shows that the trend towards English domination of both the occupants and operators of lodging houses was interrupted around 1881. The number and proportion of Irish occupants in that year was substantially above that in 1871 and five new Irish operators were in the market, although all had ceased by 1891. This spike in activity must have been due to the new surge in emigration from Stafford’s traditional sources in Mayo, Galway and Roscommon brought about by the agricultural depression after 1879, with its renewed evictions, the Land League movement and the Land War. The newly arriving Irish found beds in transient lodging houses whereas the larger and established commercial businesses – 12 Back Walls North, 52 Back Walls South, 76 Foregate Street and 54 Grey Friars – now catered for a wide range of largely English occupants. Elizabeth Lees’s establishment at 76 Foregate Street, for example, was registered for up to 28 lodgers in five rooms.[17] She was given a month in gaol in 1887 for buying a deserter’s army shirt, an example of the pathetic transactions that could occur with lodgers desperate for money.[18] In February 1896 the Council Public Health Committee removed Lees from the register because she had failed to notify the authorities about two cases of smallpox in her lodging house ‘and in other ways had shown herself to be incompetent’. All the lodgers and the whole house had to be disinfected and the premises ceased at that point to be a lodging house.

Lodging houses in 1901

By 1901 lodging houses in Stafford primarily catered for English itinerants; there were very few Irish occupants because, in Stafford at least, immigrants had mainly settled there in earlier decades and there were relatively few new immigrants arriving. Other places in Britain and overseas were more attractive. One new part-Irish family did, however, emerge as lodging house entrepreneurs in the late Victorian period. Thomas Comar was a labourer who had been born around 1855 in Dunmore, Co. Galway, a classic place of origin for the Stafford Irish. He must have been one of the emigrants who came to the town after the crisis of 1879, perhaps because he already had contacts there. He married Ellen Best, a hawker from Worcestershire, in Stafford in 1884 and in 1891 they were living at 18 Sash Street.

In Sash Street the Comars were already taking in lodgers and in 1895 the couple moved on to much greater things. On 2 September of that year Ellen was registered as the keeper of a lodging house at No. 8 Back Walls South. The place was a substantial old house that had now fallen on hard times since it was registered with seven rooms catering for 56 lodgers, by far the biggest lodging house in the town. On Census night in 1901 there were in fact 61 lodgers in the property, so the Comars were obviously happy to breach the regulations for extra money. Only one was Irish, Thomas Mitchell, a labourer who had been born in Dublin. In 1907 the registration of No. 8 was taken over by Alma Beatrice Moore née Churchley. [19]She was treated as Thomas and Ellen Comar’s daughter but the relationship was irregular and is difficult now to fathom.[20] Alma and her husband Henry Moore continued to run the business in the succeeding years although Henry was killed in the Great War and Alma subsequently remarried.[21] Ellen had died in 1909 but the widowed Thomas lived on in the lodging house. In 1911 he was a ‘sanitary worker’ for the corporation in 1911 and he was still living at No. 8 when he died a quarter of a century later.[22]

Council inspection and control

Lodging houses were perceived by the Victorian ruling and middles classes as potential dens of deviance and danger, and local authorities were encouraged to subject them to a degree of supervision and control beyond that applied to the rest of the housing stock. Stafford Borough seems to have been fairly rigorous in pursuing lodging house keepers guilty of misdemeanours and for much of the period that meant it was the Irish who were particularly targeted since they offered most lodgings. From Famine times onwards there were frequent prosecutions for breaches of lodging house by-laws, particularly for non-registration, mixed-sex occupation, failing to limewash premises and overcrowding beyond the permitted number.

The borough police force was given the job of enforcing the regulations and the force seems to have pursued suspected miscreants with vigour and officiousness, particularly if they were Irish. A typical case occurred 23 February 1881. At 5.30 am in the dark of this February morning a constable hammered on the door of Ann Mannion’s cottage at No. 3 Snow’s Yard. He went inside and upstairs he found one person in excess of the licenced number and downstairs in the kitchen Ann and three children were sleeping in one bed and two other women were sleeping in another. Mannion said one of the people upstairs was her son ‘who had been to attend to the lodgers’ and that she was ‘ignorant of having broken the law’. The court was told, however, that she had been fined previously for the same offence and had been supplied with a copy of the regulations. She was fined ten shillings with seven shillings costs or the alternative of fourteen days in gaol.[23]

The widowed Ann Mannion was clearly the victim of police harassment of this stigmatised slum court and it is noteworthy that the incident took place during the surge of new Irish immigrants after 1879. Ann Mannion did not remain in the business professionally, though she probably took in casual lodgers again. As the number of lodging houses declined, and the houses became larger commercial businesses, prosecutions also fell away. By the 1900s relations between the police, council and commercial lodging house keepers were probably more collusive and prosecutions relating to lodging houses normally concerned criminal acts by lodgers not by the keepers.

62/3 Foregate Street today. Now a listed building, the whole frontage has been reconstructed and all trace of the division between the old lodging house and the pub removed.

Conclusion

It is clear that the various types of lodging house in Victorian Stafford carried out the function of a reserve stock of accommodation sensitive to changes in need and demand. In broad terms we have seen three phases in lodging house history of which the first two particularly related to the Irish. Firstly there was the response to the Famine crisis and then there was the shift to accommodating seasonal migrant labour. Finally the sector contracted back to the ever-present residual role of providing cheap beds for mainly English itinerants and marginal workers. In that form it continued to exist until the creation of the Welfare State.

[1] The Town Improvement Clauses Act, 1847, the Common Lodging Houses Act, 1851 and the Common Lodging Houses Act, 1853.

[2] Quoted in ‘Shelters and Common Lodging Houses’ in the British Medical Journal, 21 September 1895.

[11] The Kelly family were still living at No. 5 Bell Yard at the time of the 1861 Census when James was described as an agricultural labourer and Jane a washerwoman. No lodgers were listed in the house but the Kellys may, of course, have been lying. It would have been in Jane’s character but it means they do not appear amongst the 1861 lodging houses in my list.

[22] Stafford RD, deaths, January-March 1909, 6b/15, Ellen Constance Comar and March 1935, 6b/26, Thomas Comar. Thomas’s effects were valued at £56 11s 11d, a paltry sum, so superficially he had made little from the lodging house. He may, of course, have prudently disposed of his estate to his daughter before death. England and Wales National Probate Calendar, 1858-1966 (Ancestry database accessed 25 July 2016).

In my last two posts (17 February and 22 March 2016) I looked at the Raftery families who settled in Stafford in the nineteenth century. The first of these, the ‘Roscommon Rafterys’, were in many ways classic Famine emigrants, destitute people forced out of Ireland at the height of the Famine in the dreadful year of 1847. This post, the first of two, looks at what was happening in the area of about fifteen miles radius round the town of Castlerea, Co. Roscommon. It encompassed the north west of Co. Roscommon and adjacent areas of Cos. Galway and Mayo and it suffered extreme population loss during the Famine.

By the mid-1840s a scattering of people had already gone to Stafford from the Castlerea district. I looked at the reasons why in my post on 26 August 2015. Each year they were joined by harvesters from the area and this pattern might well have carried on for decades. The Famine changed all that. Even the small town of Stafford was to feel the impact, and the link between the Castlerea area and Staffordshire proved to be vital for many of the Famine’s victims.

On 23 September 1845 it was reported that around Ballinrobe, Co. Mayo, ‘The potato crop … is both ample and good … bountiful and healthy.’[1] At the same time the first reports were coming in from eastern Ireland of a new disease affecting the crop and on 20 October a constabulary report from Ballaghadereen, Co. Roscommon, said that ‘incipient disease of the potato crop has shown itself in a partial way in this district within the last few days.’[2] Two weeks later the rot had become general, ‘there being no instance in which the crop has wholly escaped the infection. … The general opinion, particularly since the wet weather has set in, is that at least one half of the whole crop will be destroyed before the first of next month.’[3] The deadly potato blight, phytophthora infestans, had arrived in the district.

As a direct result of the Famine the population of the Castlerea district fell from an estimated 255,779 in 1845 to 186,063 in 1851 – a loss of nearly 70,000. In other words, more than a quarter of the entire population disappeared from the area in just six years. Many people died from starvation, privation and disease, but large numbers also emigrated. It is impossible to say exactly how many because there is no accurate record of the people who died during the Famine, but between 30,000 and 50,000 may have died and 20,000 to 30,000 people emigrated from the Castlerea area during these terrible years.[4]

People emigrated during the Famine for five interlinked reasons. The first was the most direct impact of the Famine – starvation, destitution and inability to pay rent. This often triggered a second factor – eviction or the threat of eviction from the land because people couldn’t pay the landlords’ rent. In some parts of Ireland ‘landlord-assisted emigration’ – giving tenants money for passage to England or America – was a way of effectively evicting people, but the landlords of the Castlerea area were too poor, too uninvolved or too mean to adopt this approach. The third force driving people to emigrate was the impact of Poor Law forcing out small land-holders, a factor that became more devastating in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Fourthly, many people in secondary and tertiary occupation, such as carpenters, builders and traders, found their incomes disappearing as the Famine depressed the economy and demand for their goods and services dwindled. These four ‘push’ factors were increasingly complemented by the ‘pull’ force of contacts with people who had already left and sent money, information and prospects of help to those left behind.

The Tory government of Sir Robert Peel established a Relief Commission in November 1845 to organise food depots and respond to the efforts of local relief committees. [5] Local community leaders – magistrates, landlords, clergy – in the Castlerea area developed a comprehensive patchwork of such committees during the early months of 1846. The government made arrangements to secretly import Indian corn (maize) from America and from December 1845 schemes were developed to provide employment on public works. Wages of eight pence or ten pence a day were paid to men who could do this work but that was ‘insufficient to support themselves, much less their starving families.’[6]

Even the stored potatoes were destroyed by blight. In January 1846 it was reported from Lough Glynn in Tibohine parish, Co. Roscommon, that ‘within the last fortnight and even the last few days the potatoes in pits are nearly all diseased or quite rotten.’[7] This sudden loss of staple food immediately brought hunger to the masses and by March 1846 it was reported that there was ‘great distress’ in the Baronies of Dunmore and Tiaquin (Co. Galway) and that in the Barony of Castlereagh (sic) ‘the distress prevalent in the district (was) likely to increase’.[8] Conditions rapidly worsened during the late spring and in July 1846 it was obvious that the potato disease was striking the new crop even more virulently than the previous year. On 22 August the Tuam Herald reported the ‘total annihilation of the potato crop’.[9] At the same time the Whig Russell Government that had taken office on 30 June 1846 ordered the winding up of the Public Works programme. This took away the only sustenance for those with enough strength to work for the measly wages offered.

By the autumn of 1846 the Castlerea district was in the grip of starvation and destitution. Although the public works were restarted during the autumn, they never brought enough money to those most in need, and the local Famine Relief Committees reported harrowing starvation and death. William French, a member of a large landowning family in the Frenchpark area of Roscommon, wrote that

‘You can scarcely conceive the state of privation and misery to which (the populace) are now reduced in consequence of the great scarcity, the exhaustion of their means and the high price at which every article of food has arrived. I have actually seen many after spending their day in Frenchpark return in tears to their family without a particle of food, and latterly the men have become fierce and wicked, and disposed to commit outrage if their wants are not supplied. The works have not recommenced to any extent, but at all events no monies have yet been received for labour, so that I really fear for the lives of the weak and all those who are unequal to the struggle.’[10]

By November 1846 deaths from starvation were reported from Drumatemple, and a ‘population of 262 families (are) totally destitute of support’. Things rapidly worsened over the winter, so that on 14 January 1847 the secretary of the Ballintobber Relief Committee (Roscommon) reported ‘Thousands of persons are absolutely perishing through want. Sickness is making frightful havoc among them’[11] At Killererin (Killeroran), across the border in Galway,

‘at least two thirds of the population (are) without means. …. I know a family last week to shut themselves up in their house and let the parents and seven children lay down and give themselves up to death….and one poor widow who got three days refuge in a poor person’s house. When she left the house her daughter had to carry her on her back begging, and in that position she died and was taken dead off her back.’[12]

From all over the district starvation and death multiplied. In February 1847 Charles Strickland, the chairman of the Lough Glynn famine relief committee wrote of ‘the dreadful state of the poor in these districts. We are daily witnessing deaths of starvation which no means in our reach at present can avert.’[13] Localities dominated by absentee landlords were particularly suffering, and the reasons were sometimes linked directly to the land holding system. In Cloonygormican and Dunamon in Co. Roscommon it was stated that

‘The district is unfortunately circumstanced in its means of receiving relief. The landlords are, in almost every instance, absentees, and, from the proprietors of a large portion of the district, no relief is likely to be received as their estates are under the control of the Court of Chancery……Another circumstance which tends, in a great degree, to prevent us from receiving relief is the extent to which subletting has been carried on in the district, and on properties on which are the largest proportion of paupers.’[14]

In Kilcorkey and Baslick parishes (Roscommon) another aspect of the land system was emphasised, together with the vagaries of the public works programme.

‘This district …. is very large and from the circumstances of its being mostly a grazing country, the people were in the habit of living solely on the conacre system……The distress is still greater here owing to the suspension of public works in part of the district by the board who, to punish some persons who made an attack on one of their overseers, have thought fit to punish the innocent with the guilty for the span of more than one month. The provisions are so dear and scarce that the people are dying around me from starvation.’[15]

Week by week the local newspapers documented the suffering. In February 1847 the Tuam Herald wrote that ‘The condition of the people … is becoming daily worse. …. They are perishing in hundreds by the roadside. “Starvation inquests” are alas! still held in abundance.’ Three weeks later it poignantly described how, in the town, ‘the hearing of persons dying from want or destitution has now become as familiar to our ears as the striking of the clock.’[16]

By the beginning of 1847 there was a rising tide of emigration. On 23rd January The Times carried a report that

‘A gentleman, whose statements are entitled to the highest respect, gives a most deplorable picture of the condition of the county of Roscommon….He says that whole villages are depopulated, either by death or by the flight of such as have the means of transport to England, Scotland or America.’[17]

In April 1847 the Tuam Herald reported that ‘for some weeks past our town has been crowded daily with hundreds passing through, collected from all quarters, making their way to the nearest seaport where ships can be had to take them away from the land of their fathers.’ The paper took the view that ‘the emigrants are not those people who cannot find food or employment – they are the pith and marrow of the land – comfortable farmers who take all their means with them, leaving only the destitute behind them’.[18]

It was direct emigration to America from local ports like Galway City that most impressed local commentators, since these were the people who could afford to pay for their passage. Many of the emigrants from the Castlerea area going to America had to pass through Tuam town and these were the people crowding the streets in the Herald’s description. The route in the opposite direction was the one taken by the people who ended up in Stafford. In February 1847 a traveller from Roscommon to Dublin ‘passed on the roads crowds of young men, and not a few young women, and some children, journeying towards Liverpool with the intention of proceeding thence to America.’[19] The parallel with the plight of the refugees in Europe today is striking.

It is often thought that the emigrants who finished up in Britain were those too poor or dissolute to get to better destinations overseas – a kind of Irish residuum at the bottom of the social hierarchy. The Stafford evidence suggests a more mixed picture but many of the Famine arrivals were nevertheless destitute labourers and conacre holders. They had to flee whilst they had any means and opportunity to do so. Famine refugees began to appear in Stafford in April 1847 and the numbers reached their peak in the summer of that year. The most unfortunate – the starving, the destitute, the ill and the dying – ended up in the vagrant ward of the workhouse or the infirmary. Some of the families who settled in Stafford, like the Roscommon Rafterys, the Sweeneys from Galway and the Colemans from Knock, Co. Mayo, arrived in the town at the height of the Famine in 1847.

Catherine Coleman with her granddaughter Catherine Moore, Stafford, c.1900. Catherine Coleman had been born in Co. Mayo in 1835 and came to Stafford with her parents as a childhood refugee from the Famine.

In the autumn of 1847 the Catholic dioceses of Ireland carried out a ‘destitution survey’, asking parish priests to report on the consequences of the Famine in their areas. In the Castlerea district it was an appalling picture. On average the priests reported that around thirty per cent of the families were absolutely destitute with most of the others in severe want. Upwards of seven per cent of the population had died as a direct result of the Famine whilst around sixteen per cent of the families had already emigrated.[20] In the next post I’ll look at the other forces at work in the district during the Famine.

[1] L. Swords, In their own words: the Famine in North Connacht, 1845-49, (The Columba Press, Dublin, 1999), p. 18.

[4] Various attempts were made to produce figures for the number of deaths and emigrants in the Castlerea district using estimates and techniques adopted by analysts of the national and county impact of the Famine. The fact that the study area overlaps three counties complicated this process, but the main problem was that there is a bewildering variety of death rate estimates during the Famine coupled to problematic assumptions about the impact of the tragedy on the birth rate. The estimates of deaths in the Castlerea district produced by the various techniques ranged from 51,795 down to 21,929, but the majority lay between the low thirty thousands to the upper forty thousands. The resultant emigration figures mostly ranged from the low to the high twenty thousands, hence the figures given in the text. It is impossible to be more precise, important as the issue is. See S.H. Cousens, ‘The regional pattern of emigration during the Great Irish Famine, 1846-51’, Trans. Inst. Brit. Geographers, Second Series, 28, (1960), pp. 119-134; W.E. Vaughan & A.J. Fitzpatrick, Irish Historical Statistics: Population 1821-1971, (Dublin, 1978), Table 42; J. Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved, (London, 1985), esp. pp. 266-7.

[20] Usable reports of the Destitution Survey for the parishes of Kilcorkey, Fuerty, Elphin, Baslick, Ballintubber and Drumatemple were published in the Roscommon Journal on 30 October 1847. Those for Dunmore, Crossboyne, Ballaghadereen, Kilcolman and Castlemore were in the Tuam Herald on 13 November 1847.

In my last post I looked at the Raftery family who fled to Stafford from Kiltullagh, Co. Roscommon, during the Famine, and particularly at the sad life of William Raftery. This week we look at a second but unrelated Raftery family. They came from Co. Galway and they finally settled in Stafford in the 1870s, a point which emphasizes how Irish immigration was a long drawn out process.

These new arrivals were three Raftery brothers, Michael (b. 1836), James (b. 1842) and John (b. 1848). In the 1881 census John Raftery stated precisely where he was born – Glenamaddy in Co. Galway.[1] Glenamaddy was a very small town in the north-east of the county and in the 1850s Thomas Raftery held just one acre of land on its northern outskirts – plot 17 on the Griffiths Valuation map. Another relative, Timothy, held plot 1 on the map in partnership with two other men. Their land amounted to nearly five acres.[2] The three brothers who settled in Stafford may have been sons of one these men.[3] They had clung on after the Famine but were existing in desperate poverty on these minute holdings. They lived in the heart of the area which exported many of Stafford’s Irish settlers and the Raftery brothers had many connections in the town before they finally settled there.

Raftery land holdings in Glenamaddy, 1856, from the Griffiths Valuation survey.

They came to the Stafford district as early as 1862. At the beginning of September that year James and John Raftery were with a group of harvest workers who got involved in a fracas at the Greyhound Inn, Yarlet, to the north of Stafford. James was accused of assaulting a policeman, and the chairman of the bench ‘warned the prisoner and his fellow countrymen that they must not import that form of brutality into this country or they would be severely punished.’[4] He was fined 40s plus costs or one month in jail.

The three Raftery brothers presumably continued to come to Stafford for harvest work during the 1860s and they seem to have finally given up in Ireland and settled in the town around 1874. In doing so they left the land and worked as bricklayer’s labourers. Michael Raftery had married a woman called Margaret in Ireland, and they came with two surviving children, Matthew (b. 1861) and Michael (b. 1867). James and John arrived as single men, but they both married within a year and their marriage relationships were somewhat unusual. John Raftery married Margaret Hart (b. 1853) at St Austin’s on 29 September 1874.[5] Her father, Anthony Hart, was a Famine immigrant from Co. Galway. He worked as a farm labourer and almost certainly came from the same district as the Rafterys. More intriguing is the fact that Anthony Hart’s wife, Margaret’s mother, was Bridget Raftery! We know this from her sister Mary’s baptism record.[6] It seems that in Margaret Hart John Raftery was marrying a close relative, though how close it is impossible to say. John and Margaret Raftery set up house at 10 Snow’s (or Red Cow) Yard, the notorious slum court we have visited previously in this blog.

Snow’s or Red Cow Yard in 1880 from OS 1:500 plan 37/11/7, Stafford Borough. Note the Red Cow pub at the entrance with its malthouse and brewery behind the houses.

The following year (1875) James Raftery married Margaret Hart’s sister Mary. It was not Mary’s first marriage. Her first in 1869 was to a cowman, John McCormick, who in 1861 was working at Highfields farm outside Stafford. He must have decamped or died in the early 1870s and Mary tried again with James Raftery in 1875.[7] It seems the couple then lived for a time in Manchester since their first child, Bridget, was born there in 1875. They settled back in Stafford shortly afterwards and moved into no. 11 Snow’s Yard next door to John and Margaret. On numerous occasions down the years they were all involved in fights, drunkenness and ‘Irish Rows’ in the yard and around the Red Cow pub at the entrance.[8] These immigrants had replaced the poverty of rural life in Ireland with an impoverished urban existence in England from which the only relief was drink. Their houses, thrown up in backland near the River Sow in the late 18th century, were overcrowded and squalid, and in these conditions trivial incidents rapidly escalated into violence. They were living the same brutalized lives as thousands of other poor Irish – and British – families in Victorian Britain. Most of the conflicts were purely within the Snow’s Yard community but in 1902 Margaret was convicted of assaulting George Collins, a bailiff, in the Maid’s Head Vaults. She struck him twice in the face and ‘accused him of robbing poor people’. With good reason – he had taken goods from her four years previously under a distress warrant, presumably for non-payment of rent. The landlords of Snow’s Yard were notorious for charging high rents for lousy properties and tipping people out on the street with no compunction.

The Red Cow pub photographed around 1900 when it had been renamed the Falcon. The building dated back to the 17th century and was inherited by Justinian Snow in 1765. He built Snow’s Yard was down the entry to the left. (Picture courtesy of the late Roy Mitchell. Details from J. Connor, The Inns & Alehouses of Stafford, Part 2 (2014).

John and Margaret Raftery’s later life continued to be unstable, one symptom of which was frequent house moves. They got out of Snow’s Yard in the 1880s and lived in other slum houses in Stafford’s north end. They may have spent some time in Derbyshire since their son John was born there around 1887 but that was clearly a temporary move. In 1901 they were living at 75 Greyfriars, still close to Snow’s Yard. In September that year John Raftery was given a month in the gaol with hard labour for ‘a cowardly wife assault’. He made a savage attack on his wife who ‘had not taken proceedings against him before and did not wish to press the case now as he had promised to behave better in future’. That exposed the violence taking place within the family as well as outside it. John failed to turn up in court and the magistrates were clearly unimpressed by his wife’s cowed explanation.[9]

In the midst of such family stress John and Margaret brought eleven children into the torrid world of Snow’s Yard but six failed to survive infancy in such conditions. Margaret (b. 1880), Agnes May (b. 1884) and John (b. 1887) went on to marry but the subsequent whereabouts of Bridget (b. 1893) and Annie (b. 1895) are unknown. John married Jane Burton in 1913 and most of the people in Stafford today who retain the Raftery name are probably their descendants.

Margaret Raftery was aged around 66 when she died in 1918, a reasonable life span given the ravages of pregnancy, drink and stress.[10] John Raftery was still alive at that time; it is not known when or where he died. John and James’s brother Michael Raftery had died in 1880 – he didn’t survive long in Stafford.[11] His widow Margaret seems to have remained there with her two children for some time but nothing more is known about them except that Matthew (b. 1861) died in Stafford Workhouse in 1916.[12]

James and Mary Raftery went on to have at least nine children, of whom only four survived to adulthood. By 1901 three of them, Harriet (b. 1877),[13] Mary Ellen (b. 1881) and Agnes (b. 1883) had moved to Manchester and were living together in the Openshaw district. This suggests the family continued to have relatives or contacts in the city dating from the 1870s when James and Mary had been there. The move to Manchester got these young women out of their miserable Snow’s Yard environment. Agnes and Mary Ellen worked in a pickle factory, and Mary Ellen married George Adams, a railway worker, in 1907.[14] They went on to have a number of children and in 1911 were living in Wolverhampton. The subsequent history of James and Mary Raftery is unknown – they did not live in Stafford – but Mary finally died in the town in 1924.[15]

The Galway and Roscommon Raftery families lived separate but parallel lives in Stafford. By no means all Stafford’s Irish immigrants conformed to the stereotypical picture of Irish refugees, but the Rafterys in many ways did. Forced to leave Ireland, they struggled to make a living in the harsh world of Victorian England. They relied on casual manual work to keep body and soul together. They could afford nothing but the worst housing, and they often had to move from place to place; there was little stability in their lives. Life was a struggle and it brought its share of petty conflicts and violence, both stimulated and ameliorated by drink. Nevertheless, as time went on and new generations grew up the Raftery descendants who remained in Stafford took their place in working class society and progressively intermingled with it. There ultimately was no relict Irish community in Stafford. The Rafterys were people of Irish descent who added their distinctive character to the evolving social mix that characterised even this small town in Midland England.

[1] The name of the town can be spelt in many different ways, both historically and even today. The common form is Glenamaddy but the Irish Ordnance Survey uses two ‘n’s.

[2] National Library of Ireland, Griffiths Valuation of Ireland, Parish of Boyounagh, Township of Glennamaddy (sic), printed 1856. There were other Raftery families in Ballyhard and Stonetown townships some distance from Glenamaddy.

[3] Although the baptism register for Boyounagh RC parish (covering the Glenamaddy area) reveals many Raftery baptisms in the 1840s the three brothers do not appear. A church baptism cost 2s 6d and it may be that these Rafterys could not or would not pay the fee. Catholic Parish Registers, Boyounagh Parish, Co. Galway, 1838-65, Ancestry database, accessed 22 March 2016.

[6] Birmingham Archdiocesen Archive, St Austin’s registers, Stafford, P255/1/2. Mary Hart had been born around 1851 in Ireland, but the Harts must have moved to Stafford when she was a baby since she was christened at St Austin’s on 15 May 1851.

[7] Information from Maureen Jubb, September 2006. There is no record of McCormick’s death in Stafford but numerous men of that name died elsewhere in England during this period. The fact that James and Mary, as Catholics, married in the Register Office suggests they had something to hide. Stafford RD, marriages July-September 1875, 6b/26.

[8] For example, see SA, 13 February 1875, 4 September 1875, 11 September 1875, 19 May 1877, 4 June 1881, 5 May 1883, 14 September 1901, 25 September 1909

Every refugee has a specific experience in reacting to the pressures forcing them to leave their homeland. This blog documents the experiences and subsequent history of people and families forced to leave Ireland in the nineteenth century and who ended up in one particular English town. Politicians today would do well to remember that today’s ‘refugees’, ‘asylum seekers’ or ‘economic migrants’ are human beings who are following in the historic paths trodden by millions before them. Grim as the Irish experience in Britain and the New World often was in the nineteenth century, the treatment of many migrants today is arguably worse. For Engels’s ‘Little Ireland’ in 1840s Manchester, read ‘the Jungle’ in Calais today.

This post looks at some very ordinary Irish people who, from modest beginnings, formed a nuclear family whose descendants fanned out into the host society. They were not forced out of Ireland during the Famine itself but were amongst the waves of people who saw no future in the country in the succeeding decades. The Caulfield family initially lived elsewhere in England before finally settling in Stafford. They became a family that aspired to respectability despite apparently humble origins and were the sort of people who began to appear at the soirées I described in my last post.

The surname Caulfield can either be an Anglicisation of the Irish MacCathmhaoil or be derived from a 17th century English planter family. It is relatively common in Cos Mayo, Galway and Roscommon, the classic area of Stafford’s Irish immigrants, and Francis William Caulfield was indeed from Co. Galway and had been born there around 1846 at the height of the Famine. He seems to have come to England as a young man in the 1860s and worked as a gardener in Chester, a city which at that time had many market gardens in the surrounding area. We know he was there in 1868 because in that year he married Ann Sanders who had been born in Co. Mayo in the late 1830s.[1] In 1871/2 they were living in Hoole, an outer suburb of Chester, with their three young children, although their baby Mary Ann died early in 1871 when she was only about three months old.[2]

Between 1872 and 1874 the Caulfields left Chester and moved down the main railway line to the Tamworth area in Staffordshire where their daughter Annie was born in the latter year.[3] We know they finally settled in Stafford town in the next four years because poor Annie died in the town in the autumn of 1878.[4] The surviving Caulfield family therefore consisted just of Francis and Ann and their two sons Simon (b. 1869) and Francis Patrick (b. 1872). The family was Catholic.

Francis Caulfield probably moved to Stafford to get a better job because in 1881 he was described as a nursery foreman and the family was living in the respectable locality of New Garden Street. By 1891 they had moved to the equally respectable Telegraph Street in Forebridge. As befitted their status, Ann Caulfield was recorded at St Patrick’s soirée in 1896.[5] By 1901 Francis’s fortunes had declined, however. He had reverted to being a ‘gardener’ and as aging 60-year olds the couple were living in more straitened circumstances in the far-from–salubrious Cherry Street. Their two sons had left home in the 1890s. Francis and Ann ultimately ended up in a miserable cottage in Tenterbanks, and in 1911 Francis was making a bit of money as a ‘jobbing gardener’. They lived to a good age, however, because Ann died in 1918 aged around 81 and Francis in 1922 when he was 76.[6]

Francis and Ann Caulfield were, therefore, rather late in-migrants to Stafford. Although their circumstances were modest, they were clearly a hard-working and aspirant family. Their son Simon achieved a sound education and began work as a clerk in White and Westhead’s accountancy firm. In 1896 he married Emily Julia Deavall, the daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth Deavall, a local Stafford Catholic family.[7] He must have been a diligent worker and in 1899 he was appointed chief clerk and cashier to the Stafford Borough Gas and Electricity Department. [8] He worked there for the rest of his career. He was a respected local government officer and took a fairly prominent role in social and professional activities related to his work, as well as being active in the social life of St Patrick’s Church.[9] The couple lived at a respectable address in the north end, 86 Victoria Terrace, and they stayed there for the rest of their lives. They had eight children, five boys and three girls, and they have many descendants today living in the Midlands and elsewhere in Britain.

Stafford gas and electricity works in 1926 where Simon Caulfield worked as clerk and cashier. The works were a polluting eyesore in Stafford town centre for well over 100 years.

Ann and Francis Caulfield’s son Francis Patrick went into Stafford’s traditional trade and became a shoemaker. Like many shoemakers he moved around in search of work, and in 1893 he must have been in the shoe town of Leicester because he married Minnie May Williams there.[10] She had been born in Chester in 1871 but the Williams family had moved to Stafford around 1872, the same time as Francis and Ann Caulfield. The two couples must have known each other in Chester. By 1901 Francis and Minnie had set up house at 43 North Castle Street and they went on to have at least nine children. Although most were born in Stafford, Gertrude was born in Manchester (1900) and Walter Francis in Leicester (1907), so this branch of the Caulfield family continued to move about in search of work. Walter Francis himself emigrated to Australia in the 1920s, and there are extensive descendants of this branch of the family in Australia today.[11]

The Caulfields were a respectable and aspirant Irish Catholic family who did reasonably well in Stafford. Although the original in-migrants Francis and Ann lived in modest circumstances and seem to have been poorer in later life, they attracted no trouble and took some part in Catholic social activities. Their son Simon did well and reached a respected middle-ranking position in the local authority. Francis was less prominent and perhaps made the wrong choice in going into the shoe trade when it was already past its peak. Overall, however, the Caulfields are an example of an Irish Catholic family and their descendants who integrated fairly seamlessly into life in Britain.

In 1830, when Ireland comprised about one third of the population of the United Kingdom, over forty per cent of the British army consisted of Irish recruits. This over-representation continued throughout the rest of the nineteenth century.[1] The Irish were essential to the army’s strength yet there has been little study of their role and historians of the Irish in Britain have almost totally ignored them.[2] In Stafford’s case, soldiers and old soldiers were a significant element amongst the Irish who came to the town.

The British army depended on Irish recruits because military wages were low. By 1850 army pay was equivalent to only the lowest farm labourer’s wages in Britain. From then on the increasing gap between British civilian and military wages caused a chronic shortage of British recruits whereas in Ireland army pay could still compete with the miserable local incomes. The army also offered security and the prospect of adventure and camaraderie, and joining up remained a preferable, even attractive, option for many.[3] This was still the case amongst the labouring Irish in Britain and that trait continued into the second-generation born in Britain.[4]

The majority of Irish recruits, unskilled and often ill-educated, were in the infantry. If they stuck it out, soldiers serving at least seven years received a gratuity and those who lasted twenty-one years got a pension. Irish soldiers were almost certain to be drafted to overseas and they were therefore both the subjects and the agents of British imperialism. Ordinary soldiers served in garrisons throughout the Empire and helped fight Britain’s imperial wars.

After discharge soldiers faced all the challenges and many of the traumas which became more familiar in the late twentieth century. Service often left men disabled, debilitated, troubled and with few skills. Some suffered from what would now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Poverty, drink and petty violence were hazards that lay in wait for those out of luck and unable to cope.

On 25 January 1908 the Staffordshire Advertiser reported the ‘sad death of a military veteran’. He was John Ryan and his life in Stafford demonstrates that army service was no simple passport to security and advancement. It could presage poverty and a squalid death. Ryan was born in Co. Galway around 1836. His father probably died in the Famine, but his mother Ann turned up in Stafford in the early 1850s and in 1855 married John Blundon, a hawker, also from Co. Galway. John Ryan must have joined the army before his mother left Ireland, and although his military record has not been traced, we know he was serving in India at the time of the ‘Mutiny’ in 1857.[5]

British soldiers storming Delhi during the Indian Mutiny (Hutton Archive/Getty Images)

John had a brother, Michael, who in 1861 was living with his mother and stepfather in Plant’s Square, Stafford. Michael became a shoemaker and in 1864 he married Rose Ward, the Stafford-born daughter of Irish immigrants.[6] The couple subsequently lived in London where Rose worked as a shoe machinist.

John Ryan left the army some time in the 1870s. He had served his full twenty-one years and received a pension, but he had also been wounded and that made him ‘feeble on his legs’ in later life. Military service had left him unfitted to compete in the labour market and he may have had mental traumas in addition to his physical injury that left him unstable and prone to violence. After discharge he had nowhere to go, so he went back to his mother in Stafford and thereafter lived with the Blundons in their various miserable dwellings. It was a wretched household. John Blundon was a violent drunkard who assaulted his cowed wife although ‘she declined to bring charges against him’.[7] In 1878 John Ryan assaulted his stepfather after the latter had again attacked his mother and hit Ryan ‘with a formidable stick’[8]. He got by doing labouring jobs and also by selling on the streets with his stepfather. His army pension was key to his survival but he must, nevertheless, have been semi-destitute.

Sometime in the 1890s old John and Ann Blundon deserted Stafford and disappeared. Perhaps they went back to Ireland. John Ryan was left to survive as best he could. Rather fortunately for him his brother Michael died in London in the same period and his widow Rose was left penniless. By 1901 she had returned to Stafford and moved in with her brother-in-law. The couple lived together as man and wife in yet another rotten house, No. 9 Snow’s Yard. Mary had a job as a needle fitter in a shoe factory but their income must have been very poor. By 1907 they were in No. 1 Plant’s Square. They had sunk to the bottom of the housing market and, ironically, it was next door to where the Ann Ryan and John Blundon had started their married lives over forty years previously.

John Ryan died at the beginning of January 1908. His inquest revealed shocking conditions. His ‘widow’ Rose reported that he was an Army Pensioner who had served through the Indian Mutiny but also that he had had bronchitis for a number of years as well as his enfeebling leg wound. He had fallen down and fractured his arm but refused to go into the Workhouse Infirmary. He died of ‘congestive pneumonia’ at home, a house where the ‘surroundings were very filthy and the stench was overpowering’ according to the doctor who attended him. The inquest jury expressed ‘regret that a man who had served his country as the deceased had done should have been allowed to live in such squalid surroundings.’[9] Just two years later Rose Ryan died a pauper in the Workhouse.[10]

John Ryan had grown up in the poverty of Galway during the Famine and had then escaped into the army, but for him army service left a legacy of problems. His remaining life was a miserable struggle to survive in an alien environment, although his common law relationship with widowed Rose at least meant John achieved some relational stability in his final years. Rose’s mention of John’s service in the Mutiny and his army pension suggests that, as with many old soldiers, his service years were the biggest thing that ever happened in his life. Nevertheless, the circumstances of his death show how, for one Irishman, years of poverty and disruption ended in squalor and degradation in a small town in the Midlands. John Ryan’s life is a grim reminder of how service in the military could cripple some migrants’ prospects for the rest of their lives.

M. Speirs, ‘Army organisation in the nineteenth century’ in T. Bartlett and K. Jeffery (eds.), A Military History of Ireland, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 335-6 and Table 15.1.

Staffordshire Advertiser (SA), 25 January 1908 – report of inquest into John Ryan’s death. The name John or J. Ryan was so common amongst army recruits that it is impossible to make a definitive identification of his service record.

Many of the Irish who came to Stafford during the Famine years and the 1850s had been evicted from their land in Ireland, particularly in the Castlerea district of Roscommon, Mayo and east Galway. Famine evictions started early in the Castlerea area, and it was the scene of one of the most notorious ‘exterminations’ to take place in Ireland during these years. It happened at Ballinlass townland near Mount Bellew, Co. Galway. The land was owned by Mrs Marcella Gerrard, an absentee who, with her husband, lived in Co. Meath and owned extensive cattle-rearing estates in Connacht.

Ballinlass townland before the Gerrard eviction showing the houses scattered along the tracks. Around 400 people were living here in 1846.

The tenancy arrangement at Ballinlass was typical of the evils of landlordism in pre-Famine Ireland. In 1827 the Gerrards had let their land to thirty tenants but then they colluded in allowing one of them, ‘Wealthy Tom’ Gavin, to become the middleman who paid all the rent to the Gerrards. The rest had to pay Gavin as undertenants. About forty other people then became undertenants of these undertenants, a diffusion of tenancy common in pre-Famine Ireland. But in 1842 Gavin absconded leaving rent arrears of £40. The undertenants offered to pay their rents directly to the Gerrards, but the latter refused to accept the money and used legal chicanery to obtain an enforceable ejectment order.[1] In other words, the landlord seized her opportunity to clear ‘surplus’ people off the land and convert it to profitable grazing.

On the morning of Friday 13 March 1846 the inhabitants of Ballinlass were evicted en masse. 270 people in 61 families were violently thrown out and left to fend for themselves. The Roscommon Journal presented a graphic report of what had happened:

‘Awful extermination of tenantry

To add to the misery of the wretched peasantry of this unfortunate country, the landlords are ably contributing to their bitter draught. Day after day we hear of families, aye, hundreds of wretches, turned out to die in the ditches by their heartless oppressors, the landlords of this country. Not later than yesterday, we are told Mrs Gerrard dispossessed not fewer than 447 wretched beings – turning them upon the world and rasing their huts to the earth. A poor man whose family were lying in fever implored to have the walls of his cabin left up in order to shelter them – but to no purpose. A poor woman with her child at her breast was not even allowed time to quit her domicile, and in the act of running out a beam fell and, we are told, killed the infant in her arms. If we are correctly informed, Mr and Mrs Gerrard have dispossessed upwards of 2,000 beings within the last four years.’[2]

This dramatic report was incorrect in some of the details, but the facts were shocking enough. What had happened at Ballinlass was publicised throughout Ireland and Britain in a series of eye-witness reports in The Freeman’s Journal between 27 March and 2 April 1846: [3]

‘The women and children … ran out of the houses half-dressed, and their frantic screams, as they gathered up some bits of clothing or furniture, was beyond all description, terrifically painful. Some were to be seen running off with the sticks that formed portions of their house roofs, and more of them, in their bare feet, were helping the men to carry off the dung in baskets on their backs and heads to the road side. Some of them clung with wild tenacity to the door-posts from whence they were dragged by the bailiffs, and those who could not be got away ran great risk of their lives by the tumbling down of the roofs and walls, and many had very narrow escapes.’[4]

‘In the first instance the roofs and portions of the walls were only thrown down. …. But on the night of Friday the wretched creatures pitched a few poles slantwise against the walls, covering them with thatch in order to procure a shelter for the night; but when this was perceived next day, the bailiffs were dispatched with orders to pull down the walls and root up the foundations in order to prevent the ‘wretches’ (this it appears is a favourite term applied to these poor people) from daring to take shelter amid the ruins. When this last act had been perpetrated, the ‘wretches’ took to the ditches on the high road where they slept in parties of from ten to fifteen each, huddled together before a fire for the two succeeding nights. I saw the marks of the fires in the ditches; everybody can see them, and the temporary shelter which the ‘wretches’ …. endeavoured to raise round them – these, with the sticks rescued from their recent dwellings, the thatch and the dung remain there as evidence of the truth of my statement. It was a melancholy sight – but more particularly so, amongst the ruins. Here a broken chair, there a smashed pot, crockeryware, remnants of old dressers, boxes, and tables, together with broken farming implements, and a hundred other articles belonging to husbandry and household purposes, lay about the gardens of the houses (that had been), or on the fields adjoining.’[5]

It was alleged that Mrs Gerrard’s agent ordered her other tenants in the district to deny shelter to the homeless of Ballinlass, and although the order was sometimes disobeyed, it seems the majority of victims were forced to huddle in the ditches along the road to Mount Bellew. By the end of the month some were in Mount Bellew itself and in other local villages. A year later some were still in the district and in a pitiable condition. On 18 April 1847 Pat Gibbons, ‘who was one of the tenants ejected by Mrs Gerrard’ and ‘who had suffered much from severe destitution’ died on the road a mile and a half from Mount Bellew. His body lay by the roadside for over a day because no one would provide a coffin.[6] Other people and families ended up in a similar state, struggling for survival and forced into the workhouses, often to die there. Most of the families that survived were forced either to emigrate or to send people to England for seasonal work.

The memorial to the families of the Gerrard eviction, Ballinlass

What have the events at Ballinlass got to do with Stafford? The answer is that some of the Gerrards’ victims may have settled in the town during and after the Famine, although it is impossible to be definite because their surnames were common in east Galway. In 1846 the Tuam Herald published a list of the heads of families evicted from Ballinlass. Four of these people were Patrick Mannion, James Monahan, John Walsh and James Egan.[7] In 1851 a Patrick Mannion was to be found in Stafford. He was then a forty year-old widower, working as a labourer. It is known that he had connections with Moylough, the parish next to Ballinlass, so he may have been a victim of the Gerrard eviction who ended up in Stafford and established a family line still to be found in the town today. Families named Walsh, Monaghan and Egan also settled in Stafford. They too may have been survivors of Ballinlass.

These tragic events in Ireland may therefore have had direct consequences in the town. Mrs Gerrard had ‘exterminated’ Ballinlass in order to turn the land over to profitable cattle pasture. Dramatic as the eviction was – and the word ‘Gerrardising’ became commonly used for evictions in the Castlerea area during the Famine – it was only one case amongst many. By August 1846 the Roscommon Journal was saying eviction was ‘the order of the day’.[8] Stafford’s Irish population was suffused with many people and families from the Castlerea district whose lives had been shattered by the Famine and eviction. They had to begin life again and respond to new challenges in a new environment. Victims though they were, those who settled in the town under such circumstances subsequently showed many divergent paths in both their own lives and those of their descendants.

[1]The Freeman’s Journal, 2 April 1846: letter from John N. Gerrard and article, ‘Landlordism in Ireland: the Gerrard Tenantry’.

[3] Many writers have used the Gerrard evictions to demonstrate the iniquities of landlord power during the Famine. In doing so they have relied on the accounts given by S. Redmond in The Freeman’s Journal. Redmond interviewed victims and local observers, and his account is a valuable record. His information on the local geography was, nevertheless, faulty since he named the townland as Ballinglass and wrongly located it in the parish of Killascobe. Most subsequent writers have uncritically accepted Redmond’s account without checking this detail. The correct identification is Ballinlass in Ballinakill parish. The population of the townland was decimated by the eviction, falling from 363 in 1841 to just four in 1851. For a recent review of the Gerrard case see Tom Crehan, Marcella Gerrard’s Galway Estate, 1820-70, (Maynooth Studies in Local History, Four Courts Press, 2013)

[4] Eye-witness account of Head Constable Dennehy of Mount Bellew, in the second article of ‘Landlordism in Ireland: the case of the Gerrard tenantry’, The Freeman’s Journal, 28 March 1846.

[5] First article of ‘Landlordism in Ireland: the case of the Gerrard tenantry’, The Freeman’s Journal, 27 March 1846.

[6]Tuam Herald (TH), 24 April 1847, a report quoted from the Galway Vindicator.

[7]TH, 4 April 1846. The same list was published in The Freeman’s Journal article on 27 March 1846 but with typographic errors. It can also be found on the memorial at Ballinlass itself that was unveiled in 2011.

Poverty and insecurity in rural Ireland was what drove Irish workers to come to Stafford. Many of Stafford’s Irish families came from an area of Roscommon, Galway and Mayo centred on the small town of Castlerea, Co. Roscommon. That is not surprising, since in pre-Famine times it was an area blighted by land hunger and landlord oppression and one of the main generators of migrant labour in Ireland. Coming over to England – and Staffordshire – to work on the harvests was one way to earn money to survive and pay the landlords’ rents.

Irish harvest workers started coming to Staffordshire in large numbers in the 1820s. At that time they were a rather shadowy presence but by 1830 there were enough of them to arouse anti-Irish hostility amongst local workers. In August 1830 four local men were convicted in Stafford of an unprovoked assault on ‘defenceless Irishmen who came over … at this season of the year to do harvest work’.[1] These were men like Michael Byrne, Dominick Dooley or John Gallagher who, in the summer of 1841, were lodging in stables, barns and poultry houses in the Stafford area. Initially there was little incentive for these men to settle permanently in Stafford. They earned their precious money in England and then went back to their families in Ireland.

The Famine began to change things. Stafford received many Irish who were forced out by starvation, destitution and eviction by landlords. Many came to the Stafford area because they had worked there before or because they knew others who had. Many now brought their families with them and settled permanently but others still clung on in Ireland and continued to come over just for harvest or other labouring work.

Information on where these people worked and the jobs they did is sketchy but estate records in the Staffordshire Record Office give us some clues. At Salt and Weston Quarries owned by the Earl of Shrewsbury ‘three Irishmen’ were given spasmodic work in the autumn of 1847. They earned 1s 6d a day. Around the same time James Dunn, James Fergusson and William Keen who, from their names, may also have been Irish, were employed more regularly but after 1849 the quarry was run down and no Irish got jobs there.[2] On the Earl’s Ingestre estate six Irishmen were intermittently employed from 1848 onward (and maybe earlier) on a variety of labouring work. One of them was John Egan, a 44 year old man who in 1851 was living in Hall’s Passage, Stafford, with his wife and four children. There were six other labourers lodging with them and these men all probably did work as a group at Ingestre if they could get it. The jobs done by John Egan ‘and company’ ranged from dressing bricks and breaking stones to harvesting hay and painting the woodwork with tar.[3]

Irish labourer in the 1850s (Sean Sexton Collection)

During the 1850s more farmwork was on offer to the Irish because agriculture was going through its prosperous Mid-Victorian ‘high farming’ period. Furthermore, many English farmworkers were now leaving the land to get better wages and more attractive jobs in the industrial towns. The farmers faced an incipient labour shortage and, like contemporary farmers employing Eastern Europeans, the Victorians looked for cheap labour elsewhere. That opened up more opportunities for the Irish. This is shown by what happened on two local farms. Haywood Park Farm was part of the Earl of Lichfield’s estate on the edge of Cannock Chase. During the second half of the 1850s casual (and nameless) Irishmen and women worked on the farm for about three months each year. By the early 1860s ‘Irish Tom’, ‘Irish John’, ‘Martin’, ‘Barney’, ‘Patrick’, ‘Rush’, ‘Michael’, ‘P. Flinn’ and a ‘lad’ were all doing spells of work on the farm for which they were paid between 1s 8d and 2 shillings a day. Only after 1865, however, did an Irishman, Tommy Lyons, find regular employment at Haywood Park all the year round.[4]

At Loynton Hall Farm near Norbury permanent employment for the Irish came a lot earlier. In February 1853 three unnamed Irishmen were given two weeks’ work threshing wheat, shovelling manure and muck spreading. These dirty jobs done, they left. Other casual Irish were employed later in the year. In 1854 a change occurred because two named Irishmen were taken on permanently. They were Thomas and Michael ‘Wire’ (?O’Dwyer or Maguire?). Michael left in 1856 but Thomas remained to the end of the surviving data in 1859.[5]

Like John Egan, many of the Irish labourers lived in the Stafford slums and trekked out to the farms every day in all weathers or else they bedded down in barns and shacks in the countryside. It was a hard life and after 1865 their chances of farmwork started to disappear as mechanisation started to replace men by machines. At Haywood Park Farm after 1871 there was almost no work for the Irish apart from Tommy Lyons and the farm’s labour force overall had been cut back. The principle was clearly ‘last in, first out’ and the Irish lost out. They either had to adapt or go elsewhere. Anthony Conner, for example, was, in 1861, a farmworker who lived in Allen’s Court, Stafford, along with five other relatives and lodgers. In 1871 he still lived in Allen’s Court but now he had switched to being a bricklayer’s labourer. His associates had all left the town. Martin McDermott had also been an agricultural labourer but lost his job on the land and ended his years in 1877 cleaning out tubs of human excrement in the Borough Council’s sanitary department.[6] Other redundant and aging farmworkers were also left stranded in a shadowy world of casual work and poverty. Many died as paupers in the Workhouse. They were some of the saddest victims amongst the social wreckage of the Famine.

John and Elizabeth Kavanagh arrived in Stafford in the 1850s. They were not in the town at the time of the 1851 Census, but they claimed their first child, Ann, was born there around 1853. There is, however, no record of this in Stafford and the Kavanaghs illustrate how, even in this age of accessible digital data, it can be very difficult to trace the history of migrant people who were often illiterate, had little idea of their exact age, had surnames open to a variety of spellings and who, in any case, sometimes ignored the legal niceties of registration. Even so, the outlines of their lives can still be followed.

John was an agricultural labourer who had been born in Ireland in the 1830s. We have no precise evidence of where he came from in Ireland but it is likely to have been the Roscommon/Galway/Mayo area from which many of Stafford’s immigrants came. The birthplace of his wife Elizabeth is also uncertain since in 1861 the couple claimed it was Ireland whilst in 1871 they said Warrington in Lancashire.[1] The birth dates of their children suggest that John and Elizabeth married in the 1850s, probably in England but not in Stafford. As a Famine immigrant, John could have met his wife in Liverpool in the course of moving from north-west England to the Midlands.[2]

In Stafford the couple lived in areas of substantial Irish settlement. In 1861 they were to be found in Plant’s Court, a slum in Forebridge. By 1871 they had moved to 52 Back Walls South, a gloomy area where many poor people lived including Irish immigrants.

Back Walls South where the Kavanaghs had their lodging house.

John Kavanagh worked initially as a farm labourer but later moved off the land and became a general labourer. The couple also made money from running a lodging house. The 1861 and 1871 Census returns superficially suggest their enterprise was rather unsuccessful since in each case the two lodgers listed in the dwelling were far outnumbered by the Kavanaghs own expanding family. More people crowded into the house at other times, however, since in 1867 the couple were convicted of ‘permitting three women and one man to sleep in one apartment (contrary to the bye-laws) which was a small one’.[3]

The Kavanaghs’ life in the slums of Stafford was probably pretty miserable although they raised at least six children there. Elizabeth Kavanagh had her last child, Mary, in 1871 but the baby died after only five days.[4] Elizabeth herself must have been a weakened woman and though still fairly young she died sixteen months later in September 1872.[5] Her death provoked a crisis in the Kavanagh household and some time afterwards John left Stafford altogether. By 1881 he was living in Liscard near Birkenhead with four of his children. He had apparently re-married. His new wife Ann was Irish and twelve years his senior, though no record of the marriage has been found. It was probably a transitory common-law relationship. Indeed, the family may have been on Merseyside merely waiting the opportunity to emigrate. Certainly, none of them was in England in 1891. It has not proved possible to identify their onward travel from the migrant records.

The Kavanagh family pose, therefore, many problems in reconstructing their history. It is clear, however, that they proved to be long-term transients in Stafford. Although they lived in the town for about twenty years, they ultimately put down no roots there and there are probably no descendants in the district today. Their story conforms closely to the common but often rather stereotypical picture of mobile Irish emigrants whose remaining lives proved to be a battle against poverty and insecurity.

[1] The 1861 Census also lists their surname as ‘Kavan’, but they are clearly the same family as that shown as ‘Kavannagh’ ten years later. This seems to suggest that the 1871 return was the more accurate.

[2] A John Kavanagh married an Elizabeth Paton in Liverpool on 25 November 1856 (Ancestry, England: Select Marriages 1538-1973, it3, p. 114, no 228). It is known that Elizabeth’s name was probably Paton from the baptism records of St Austin’s Church in Stafford. A Paton family from Co. Roscommon lived in Stafford at that time so this may make the connection with John Kavanagh, though not definitively.

William Coram came from a family that originated in the west of Ireland. Born in Stafford in 1895, he died in France at the end of the Great War after over three years of service on the Western Front. His family was by then well-established in Stafford and it forms an interesting example of the generational transition from new immigrants to integrated residents.

William Coram’s grandfather Michael was born in Ireland around the year 1844. He almost certainly came from Connacht, probably Co. Galway, and he seems to have come to the Stafford area around 1860. In the 1861 census a Michael ‘Corron’ was a farm labourer sleeping in a barn at Acton Trussel and this man and Michael Coram were almost certainly one and the same.

The first definite record we have of Michael in Stafford was his marriage to Mary Scott at St Austin’s Church in 1861. She was one of three sisters from Co. Galway who settled in Stafford around the same time. The new Coram household lived initially in Gaol Road but later moved to the Broad Eye. Michael left the land and worked as a labourer in the building trade. They were poor and, like many Victorian families, the Corams had to take in lodgers to make more money. Mary made more by working as a charwoman in the midst of her numerous pregnancies. The couple had at least eleven children, but death continually stalked the Coram household. Eight of their children died in infancy and only Annie (b. 1864), John (b. 1867) and Agnes (b 1878) survived to adulthood. In 1878 Michael Coram himself died at the age of 34 and Mary was left to bring up her surviving children in poverty. She later remarried but died in 1902.

Michael and Mary’s only surviving son John worked as a paste fitter in the shoe trade. He began the process of intermarriage into local society because, in 1890, he married a young widow, Elizabeth Jackson née Harvey. She had been born in Haughton around 1867. The family remained in the Broad Eye and had four surviving children, although their son Michael died in 1913 at the age of 20. His father John died the same year and his mother a year later, so the curse of early death continued to stalk the Coram households.

John and Mary’s son William Coram was also to die young. In 1915 he married Kate Clews, the daughter of a local gardener, and the couple had two children. Prior to that, in 1913, William had enlisted in the Territorials, so it seems that he was already attracted by army life and money before the war. It was a classic route out of poverty for under-qualified men. He was attached to the North Staffordshire Regiment and after the outbreak of the Great War was sent to France in April 1915. He was shot twice in the left arm at the battle of Loos in October 1915 but rejoined his unit at Christmas 1915.[1] It was reported that ‘On several occasions he [showed] great courage and devotion to duty’, in particular in the heavy fighting and mining near Hill 60 near Ypres in 1916. Later that year he was a sentry guarding an ammunition dump. The rest of his guard was killed and his sentry-box was blown up but Coram stuck to his post until ordered to leave. He was awarded the Military Medal for these exploits and received considerable local publicity.[2]

William Coram wearing his Military Medal, 1916, with his wife Kate Clews and daughter Kathleen (picture courtesy of Vanessa Green and Brian Key, descendants of William & Kate Coram)

William Coram was one of the sad sacrifices of the Great War. Despite his wounds He remained on the Western Front. In August 1917 he briefly came back to Stafford on leave and visited his old school, St Austin’s. There he was presented with ‘a handsome silver wristlet watch and a large box of cigarettes’ by the parish priest. He told the children ‘he could not protect them against air raids, but he could do his best against the Germans’, and he returned to the trenches yet again to do just that.[3] He was gassed in May 1918 and wounded again in October 1918. After nearly four years of war his body could take no more and he was an almost inevitable victim of the terrible Spanish ‘flu epidemic. He died in Boulogne at the end of October 1918, two weeks before the Armistice.

William Coram’s Military Medal, and his death after fighting for Britain in the Great War, exemplify starkly the extent to which many descendants of Stafford’s Irish in-migrants had become part of the local community by the early 20th century. The Coram family experienced many of the rigours of Irish families in Britain. The initial immigrants worked in menial, insecure and poorly paid jobs and they lived in slum cottages in the poorest parts of town. Conditions were hard, but the family and its descendants seem to have lived quiet lives struggling to bring up their surviving children. The second and later generations moved into the heart of the Stafford economy, the shoe trade, but the work was hard, insecure and often unhealthy. The infant and young adult deaths that plagued the family reflected the poor conditions in which they lived. Nevertheless, by the early 20th century the Corams had put down deep roots in Stafford.

Peter Kirwan’s sojourn in Stafford could have been very short. In 1853 he was accused of involvement in Stafford’s most notorious killing of the Victorian age, the so-called ‘Five Shilling Murder’. He and two other Irishmen, Ned Walsh and Charles Moore, were charged with the murder of a farmer and his wife. In the end Kirwan escaped the hangman’s noose and ultimately the family survived in Stafford until 1884. They were one of the terminal families who just faded away.

Peter and Margaret Kirwan arrived in Stafford with their three children some time in 1852. Like many of Stafford’s Irish they came from Co. Galway. Peter Kirwan had probably worked in the Stafford area before the Famine, and now he survived on scraps of farmwork. He and his wife were already in their forties, however, and they earned a bit more money by running a lodging house in Plant’s Square. Peter Kirwan’s two occupations put him in contact with Charles Moore.

Charles Moore was the ringleader. The son of a cattle dealer from Co. Cavan, he was born around 1817. In his youth he seems to have been involved in violent Rockite activities, robbing arms as well as stealing cattle and sheep. Things got too hot for him in Cavan and he moved to Co. Kildare. There he continued thieving and was suspected of writing threatening Captain Rock letters. During the Famine he was caught stealing potatoes but assaulted the two people who discovered him. He fled to England around August 1847 and got farm jobs in the Stafford area.[1] He did some work for John Blackburn, an aged farmer who lived in a dilapidated house at Ash Flats to the south of the town. Blackburn reputedly paid Moore a shilling a day when he could not get work elsewhere.[2]

In 1852 Ned Walsh came to Stafford with his wife. Walsh already knew Moore from Co. Kildare where they had been on building work at Maynooth College. Walsh’s daughter Catherine – or Kitty – had already lived with Moore for five years and had a little boy. Charles and Kitty came to Stafford in April 1852 and by mid-1852 she was pregnant again. The Walshes arrived in October and lived with Moore in the Broad Eye. Peter and Margaret Kirwan arrived in Stafford in the same year and Peter also did work at the Blackburns’ farm from time to time. In doing so he got to know Walsh and Moore.

Though John Blackburn and his wife lived in squalor at Ash Flats it was widely suspected they had money. On 24 October 1852 dense black smoke was seen rising from the farmhouse. People nearby managed to break in and fight the fire, but they then discovered the gruesome bodies of John and Jane Blackburn in one of the bedrooms. Both their heads had been bludgeoned and Jane had also been strangled. The debris of a ransacked house was all around. The thieves had obviously been after money and valuables, but all they got was around five shillings. The miser’s money, if such there was, had been well hidden.

Initial suspicion fell on John Blackburn’s son Henry who lived in Wolverhampton. He was known to be looking forward to the old man’s demise because he would inherit property. The police then received three anonymous letters directly accusing Blackburn. That was foolish since they could only have been written by someone who knew things only an insider could have known. Charles Moore was known to have worked at Blackburn’s farm, and the finger of suspicion pointed to him and his father-in-law Ned Walsh. A shirt with singed wrists made of ‘material and substance such as labouring Irishmen usually wear’ was found in a quarry near Tixall.[3] They were arrested. The chain then led to Peter Kirwan because Ned Walsh and his wife had moved into Kirwan’s lodging house in Plant’s Square. Peter Kirwan was arrested ‘due to letters written showing a mind ill at ease’.[4]

The case was a local sensation and received considerable national coverage. At the coroner’s inquest in January 1853 Moore implicated a number of other Irishmen in the murder but the inquest jury arraigned just Moore, Walsh and Kirwan. Doubt remains about whether Henry Blackburn was involved in the conspiracy, but the jury believed his alibi and preferred to pin the blame on the Irish alone. Even so, Henry Blackburn as well as Moore, Walsh and Kirwan were committed for trial at the Crown Court. The trial opened on 21 March 1853. At that point things looked black for Peter Kirwan. The police had, however, written to the Irish Constabulary and reports came back on the three men. Moore’s character was damned – the authorities branded him manipulative, violent, a thief and an inveterate liar. Nothing bad was known about Ned Walsh, but he seems to have been a poor man of low intelligence who did whatever Moore told him.

The report about Kirwan was favorable. He was considered a man of good character.[5] This and the fact that there was nothing to link him directly with the murder led the police and Crown lawyers to offer no evidence against him. The judge therefore directed the jury to return a formal verdict of not guilty. The jury also acquitted Henry Blackburn, but Charles Moore and Ned Walsh were found guilty.

Moore was publicly hanged in front of Stafford Gaol on 9 April 1853 ‘in front of a large assembly of people.’[6] Walsh’s death sentence was commuted to transportation for life.

What became of Peter Kirwan and his family? See Part 2 of this post which will follow in a couple of weeks.

[1]Staffordshire Advertiser, 9 April 1853. Post-trial evidence about Moore’s background. See also Alfred Middlefell’s account in The Story of the Ancient Parish of Castlechurch, (Stafford, Berkswich Local History Group, 1998), pp. 24-5.